“A house may
be large or small; as long as the surrounding
houses are
equally small it satisfies all social demands for
a dwelling. But let a palace
arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from
a little house to a hut. The
little house shows now that its owner has only
very slight or no demand to
make; and however high it may shoot up in the
course of civilization, if the
neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even
greater extent, the occupant of
the relatively small house will feel more and more
uncomfortable, dissatisfied
and cramped within its four walls.

“A
noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid
growth of productive
capital. The rapid growth of productive capital
brings about an equally rapid
growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social
enjoyments. Thus, although the
enjoyments of the workers have risen, the social
satisfaction that they give
has fallen in comparison with the increased
enjoyments of the capitalist, which
are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with
the state of development of
society in general. Our desires and pleasures
spring from society; we measure
them, therefore, by society and not by objects
which serve for their
satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature,
they are of a relative
nature.

“In general,
wages are determined not only by the amount of
commodities
for which I can exchange them. They embody various
relations.” – Marx, Wage Labour and Capital,
Progress
Publishers, Moscow
1985, pp. 32-33

“The raising of wages excites
in the worker the capitalist’s
mania to get rich, which he, however, can only
satisfy by the sacrifice of his
mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and
entails the accumulation of
capital, and thus sets the product of labour against
the worker as something
ever more alien to him….

“An enforced increase of
wages (disregarding all
other difficulties, including the fact that it would
only be by force, too,
that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be
maintained) would therefore
be nothing but better payment for the slave,
and would not win either
for the worker or for labor their human status and
dignity.” – Marx, Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844,
CW, Vol. 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1975, pp.
238, 280

“But just as little as better
clothing, food, and treatment,
and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation
of the slave, so little do
they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in
the price of labour, as a
consequence of accumulation of capital, only means,
in fact, that the length
and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has
already forged for himself,
allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.” – Marx,
Capital, Vol. I, Chapter – XXV, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1974,
pp. 579-80

Great beauty /
Accumulation / Industrial reserve army

“The
great beauty of capitalist production consists in
this — that it not only
constantly reproduces the wage-worker as
wage-worker, but produces always, in
production to the accumulation of capital, a
relative surplus-population of
wage-workers.” – Marx, Capital, Vol.
I, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1974, p. 702, Also
at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm

“The
greater the social wealth, the functioning capital,
the extent and energy of
its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass
of the proletariat and the
productiveness of its labour, the greater is the
industrial reserve army. The
same causes which develop the expansive power of
capital, develop also the
labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of
the industrial reserve army
increases therefore with the potential energy of
wealth. But the greater this
reserve army in proportion to the active labour
army, the greater is the mass
of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery
is in inverse ratio to its
torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the
lazarus layers of the
working class, and the industrial reserve army, the
greater is official
pauperism. This is the absolute general law of
capitalist accumulation.” - Marx,
Capital, Vol. I, Progress Publishers,
Moscow 1974, p. 603, Also at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm

Greater the social wealth, the
greater is "the
industrial reserve army" as Engels called it in 1845
in The Conditions of the Working Class in
England (see Anti-Dühring,
Progress Publishers, Moscow 1969, p. 325).

“Accumulation of
wealth at one pole is,
therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery,
ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the
opposite pole, i.e.,
on the side of the class that produces its own
product in the form of capital.”
- Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Progress
Publishers, Moscow 1974, p. 604, Also at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm

"It
is
capitalist accumulation itself that constantly
produces in direct relation
to its own energy and extent, a relatively
redundant population, i.e. a
population which is superfluous to capital's
average requirements for its own
valorization, and is therefore a surplus
population." p. 782"The working
population therefore produce both the
accumulation of capital and the means by which
it makes itself superfluous and
it does this to the extent that it is always
increasing." p. 783The industrial
reserve army belongs to capital just as
surely as if it had bred it at its own cost. It
creates a MASS OF HUMAN
MATERIAL ALWAYS READY FOR EXPLOITATION in the
interests of capitals
valorization requirements. p. 784Marx, Capital, Vol.
1, Ch. 25

_________________________________________

.

__,_._,___

Thanks go to Comrade John Ayers of the Socialist Party of Canada for compiling these apt extracted quotes in reader friendly size.Credit

- Credit has been a powerful influence on the development of capitalist
production. Marx writes,

" If the credit system appears as a principal
lever of overproduction and excessive speculation in commerce, this is
simply because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is
now forced to its most extreme limit; and this is because a great part
of the social capital is applied by those who are not its owners, and
who therefore proceed quite unlike owners who, when they function
themselves, anxiously weigh the limits of their private capital. This
only goes to show how the valorization of capital founded on the
antithetical character of capitalist production permits actual free
development only up to a certain point, which is constantly broken
through by the credit system. The credit system hence accelerates the
material development of the productive forces and the creation of the
world market, which is the historical task of the capitalist mode of
production to bring to a certain level of development, as material
foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit
accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and
with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production."

(Capital, volume III, p 572 in the Penguin Classics edition.)

Credit
has now assumed such an important role in capitalism that it’s safe to
say without it, the system could not function in any meaningful way.
----------------------

Credit

" Apart from the joint -stock system – which
is an abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the
capitalist system itself, and which destroys private industry to the
same degree that it spreads and takes over new spheres of production –
credit offers the individual capitalist, or the person who can pass as a
capitalist, an absolute command over the capital and property of
others, within certain limits, and, through this, command over other
people’s labour. It is disposal over social capital, rather than his
own, that gives him command over social labour. The actual capital that
someone possesses, or is taken to possess by public opinion, now becomes
simply the basis for a superstructure of credit. This is especially the
case in wholesale trade, and the greater part of the social product
passes through this. All standards of measurement, all explanatory
reasons that were still more or less justified within the capitalist
mode of production, now vanish. What the speculating trader risks is
social property, not his own. Equally absurd now is the saying that the
origin of capital is saving, since what this speculator demands is
precisely that others should save for him. (As recently the whole
of France saved up one and a half thousand million francs for the
Panama swindlers – F.E.)".

(Capital, Volume III, page 570)

Note the term
"social" here that shows that capital and what it produces is a social
property, not individual and that it is the labour and product of us all
that is expropriated, showing the capitalist system is based on theft.
-------------------------

Interest

- Marx describes interest as follows,

" Let us take the average annual
rate of profit as 20 per cent. Under average conditions, then, and with
the average level of intelligence and activity appropriate to the
intended purpose, a machine with a value of 100 pounds that is applied
as capital yields a profit of 20 pounds. Thus a man who has 100 pounds
at his disposal holds in his hands the power of making this 100 pounds
into 120 pounds, and thus producing a profit of 20 pounds. What he
possesses is a potential capital of 100 pounds. If this man makes over
his 100 pounds for a year to someone else, who actually does use it as
capital, he gives him the power to produce 20 pounds profit, a
surplus-value that costs him nothing and for which he does not pay an
equivalent. If the second man pays the proprietor of the 100 pounds a
sum of 5 pounds, say, at the end of the year, i.e. a portion of the
profit produced, what he pays for with this is the use-value of its
capital function, the function of producing 20 pounds profit. The part
of the profit paid in this way is called interest, which is nothing but a
particular name, a special title, for a part of the profit which the
actually functioning capitalist has to pay to the capital’s proprietor,
instead of pocketing himself."

(Capital, volume III, page 460).

Interest,
then, is simply a part of profit handed by the capitalist to the owners
of money advanced to him for which he pays fee. It is, then, free money
for the owner of the money paid for by the unpaid labour of the worker.
-------------------------------------

Globalisation

Marx described the process of globalization of production one hundred
and fifty years ago and saw the direction it would take

…”And instead of
producing for the individual merchant or for particular customers, the
weaver now produces for the entire world of commerce…Trade now becomes
the servant of industrial production, for which the constant expansion
of the market is a condition of its existence. An ever- increasing
mass-production swamps the existing market and thus works steadily
towards its expansion, braking through its barriers. What restricts this
mass production is not trade (in as much as this only expresses
existing demand), but rather the scale of the capital functioning and
the productivity of labour so far developed.

The industrial capitalist
is constantly faced with the world market; he compares and must compare
his own cost prices not only with domestic market prices, but with those
of the whole world. Previously, this comparison was almost exclusively
the task of merchants and ensured commercial capital its mastery over
industrial.”

(Capital, volume III, pp 454/455).

In other words, in order
to exist, production must be constantly expanded. When capitalism
consisted of small pockets of industrialization in Western Europe,
expansion was indeed manageable but as the scale of capitalism covered
the whole world, such expansion necessarily has great and irreversible
impact on out environment, totally unnoticed by capital.
----------------------------------

Globalisation

- The basis and main tenets of capitalism never change and are, in fact,
unable to do so given the nature of the system. Marx noted in his time,

"And whereas in the sixteenth century, and partly still in the
seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new
world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode
of production and the rise of the capitalist mode, this happened in
reverse on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, once it had
been created. The world market itself forms the basis for this mode of
production. On the other hand, the immanent need that this has to
produce on an ever greater scale drives it to the constant expansion of
the world market, so that now it not trade that revolutionizes industry,
but rather industry that constantly revolutionizes trade. Moreover,
commercial supremacy is now linked with greater or lesser prevalence of
the conditioned for large -scale industry…. In India, moreover, the
English applied their direct political and economic power, as masters
and landlords, to destroying these small economic communities."
(Capital
volume III page 451)

It’s a preview of globalization and a snapshot of
methods applied to get there.

----------------------------------

Capital

Commercial capital is the precursor of production/industrial capital
andwas the source of the primitive accumulation of capital necessary for
the establishment of capitalist production. Marx writes,

“ Within the
capitalist mode of production – i.e. once capital takes command of
production itself and gives it a completely altered and specific form –
commercial capital appears simply as capital in a particular function. In all earlier modes of production, however, commercial capital rather appears as the function of capital par excellence,
and the more so, the more production is directly the production of the
producer’s means of subsistence. Thus there is no problem at all in
understanding why commercial capital appears as the historic form of
capital long before capital has subjected production itself to its sway.
Its existence, and its development to a certain level, is itself a
historical precondition for the development of the capitalist mode of
production (1) as precondition for the concentration of money wealth,
and (2) because the capitalist mode of production presupposes production
for trade, wholesale outlet rather than supply to the individual
client, so that a merchant does not buy simply to satisfy his own
personal needs, but rather concentrates in his act of purchase the
purchase acts of many. On the other hand, every development in
commercial capital gives production a character oriented ever more to
exchange-value.”
(Page 444, Capital, Volume III)

and ,

“ There can be no
doubt – and this very fact has led to false conceptions – that the
great revolutions that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, along with the geographical discoveries of that epoch, and
which rapidly advanced the development of commercial capital, were a
major moment in promoting the transition from the feudal to the
capitalist mode of production. The sudden expansion of the world market,
the multiplication of commodities in circulation, the competition among
the European nations for the seizure of Asiatic products and American
treasures, the colonial system, all made a fundamental contribution
towards shattering the feudal barriers to production.”
(Page 450,
Capital, volume III)

-------------------------

On production

- The capitalist system has developed many innovations to keep
production functioning and growing. Commercial capital, for instance
enables the producer to have continuous production as follows,

" If the
linen producer had to wait until his linen had really ceased to be a
commodity, until it had passed to its final buyer, the productive or
individual consumer, then his reproduction process would be interrupted.
Or, in order not to interrupt it, he would have to restrict his
operations, transform a smaller part of his linen into yarn, coal,
labour, etc., in short into the elements of productive capital, and
retain a greater part of this as a monetary reserve. This would make it
possible for one part of his capital to be present on the market as a
commodity, while another part carried on the production process, so that
when this latter part entered the market as a commodity, the other part
would flow back in the money form. This division of his capital is not
abolished by the intervention of the merchant. But, without the latter,
the part of the circulation capital that exists in the form of a money
reserve would always have to be greater in proportion to the part
employed in the form of productive capital, and the scale of
reproduction would be accordingly restricted. Instead of this, the
producer can now regularly apply a greater part of his capital in the
actual production process, leaving a smaller part as a money reserve."

*Thus production is made much more continuous with the help of merchant
capital. Note, however,

"Commercial capital is nothing more than capital
functioning within the circulation sphere. The circulation process is
one phase in the reproduction process as a whole. But in the process of
circulation, no value is produced, and thus also no surplus-value."
(Capital volume III, pages 387 and 392).

---------------------------------------------

Surplus Value

- Socialists hold that the whole of the working class is exploited by
the whole of the capitalist class in that surplus value is extracted
from or aided in extracting from the unpaid labour of the worker, no
matter what his job may be. Also, production is a communal effort.
Automobiles are not produced by auto workers alone but by a myriad of
workers in society that extract, transport, and refine raw materials and
they, in turn, are supported by a host of support workers, and so on.
Even the merchants’ workers are involved in the process even though, as
reported above*, commercial capital does not produce surplus value.

Marx writes,
" It is only by way of its function in the realization of
values that commercial capital functions as capital in the reproduction
process, and therefore draws, as functioning capital, on the
surplus-value that the total capital produces. For the individual
merchant, the amount of his profit depends on the amount of capital that
he can employ in this process, and he can employ all the more capital
in buying and selling the greater the unpaid labour of his clerks. The
very function, by virtue of which the commercial capitalist’s money is
capital is performed in large measure by his employees, on his
instructions. Their unpaid labour, even though it does not create
surplus-value, does create his ability to appropriate surplus-value,
which, as far as this capital is concerned, gives exactly the same
result; i.e. it is its source of profit. Otherwise the business of
commerce could never be conducted in the capitalist manner, or even on a
large scale."

“ What is a
working day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume
the labour-power whose daily value it has paid for? How far may the
working day be extended beyond the amount of labour-time necessary for
the reproduction of labour-power itself? We have seen that capital’s
reply to these questions is this: the working day contains the full 24
hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which
labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing its services. Hence it
is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for
the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable
time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the
self-valorization of capital. Time for education, for intellectual
development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social
intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and mind,
even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) –
what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its
insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the
moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps
the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It
steals the time required for fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over
the meal times, where possible incorporating them into the production
process itself, as coal is supplied to the boiler, and grease and oil to
the machinery.”
(Capital Volume III, pages 375/ 376).

Marx continues in
this vein with some damning and important points – worth reading. If
anyone tells you that the worker is not explited, perhaps you can quote
from these pages and point out that the vile conditions are still alive
and well around the world and heading back in that direction in the
‘rich’ countries!
---------------------------------------

Productivity

On productivity, Marx writes,

“ The value of a commodity is determined by
the total labour-time contained in it, both past and living. The rise
in labour productivity consists precisely in the fact that the share of
living labour is reduced and that of the past labour increased, but in
such a way that the total sum of labour contained in the commodity
declines; in other words the living labour declines by more than the
past labour increases.
The past labour embodied in the value of a
commodity – the constant portion of capital – consists partly of the
wear and tear of the fixed capital and partly of the circulating
constant capital that goes completely into the commodity; raw and
ancillary materials.
The portion of value deriving from raw and
ancillary materials must fall with the [rising] productivity of labour,
since, as far as these materials go, this productivity is precisely
expressed in the fact that their value has fallen. And yet it is
precisely a characteristic of rising labour productivity that the fixed
portion of the constant capital should experience a very sharp increase
and with this also the portion of value that it transfers to the
commodity as wear and tear.
For a new method of production to prove
itself as a genuine advance in productivity, it must transfer a smaller
additional share to the individual commodity for depreciation of the
fixed capital than the portion of value that is deducted because less
living labour is spared; it must in other words reduce the value of the
commodity.”

(Capital Volume III, pages 369/370).

This process is a key
to successful capitalist production – the constant striving for
productivity to reap not just surplus-value but relative surplus value
in addition, i.e. that s-v that is won by the first enterprise to use
particular method of production before his competitors catch up. It is
just one more alienation of labour from the product.
---------------------------

The rate of profit

On the rate of profit,
“ The rate of profit, i.e. the relative
growth in Capital, is particularly important for all new off-shoots of
capital that organize themselves independently. And if capital formation
were to fall exclusively into the hands of a few existing big capitals,
for whom the mass of profit outweighs the rate, the animating fire of
production would be totally extinguished. It would die out.
It is the
rate of profit that is the driving force in capitalist production, and
nothing is produced save what can be produced at a profit. Hence the
concern of the English economists over the decline in the profit rate.
If Ricardo is disquieted even by the very possibility of this, that
precisely shows his deep understanding of the conditions of capitalist
production. What other people reproach him for, i.e. that he is
unconcerned with ‘human beings’ and concentrates exclusively on the
development of the productive forces when considering capitalist
production – whatever sacrifices of human beings and capital values this
is bought with – is precisely his significant contribution.
The
development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s
historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly
creates the material conditions for a higher form of production.”

(Capital Volume III, p 368).

Thus profit before people’s needs is the
lifeblood of capitalism; capitalism has done its job; now is the time
for ‘ a higher form of production’, i.e. socialism.

3
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thanks for the goofy, impenetrable doublespeak, pseudointellectual mumbo-jumbo, cleverly constructed propaganda, and outright lies, all disguised as advanced thought to fool The People. In other words, typical Karl Marx bullshit for the cognitively impaired and supremely lazy, who are prime targets for fleecing of their ca$h.

I'm of course sure there are a lot easier ways to fleece people of their hard-earned cash than advocating a Marxist analysis of capitalism...but it isn't the Church Of $cientology (even if they too are robbers and rogues) but Wall St or the City of London where we would be taking our lessons from. Maybe we would learn from Lehman Brothers and their paid advisor, Jeb Bush, now hoping to be a president one day.Possibly from Enron where Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup were all sued for hiding Enron's true financial state....of course we could go on...and on...and on...and delve back into history to the days of the railroad barons and steel magnates prove who are the thieves and fraudsters and who really use the mumbo-jumbo of book-keeping to cover up their crimes, and employ corporate lawyers who's speciality is in legalese doublespeak to steal from the people...